When Persepolis opens, Marjane Satrapi is in grade school in Tehran. To her, the Islamic Revolution means now she has to wear a veil. Her French non-secular school closes and she must attend a gender segregated school. It means that when her mom is photographed by news agencies demonstrating in the streets, her mom must [...]
About: Christa
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The Torres-Thompson family of Southern California has crested flush financial times and is now dipping into a place where flashing plastic can have humiliating results. Scott, a programmer, and Maureen, a stay-at-home mom, have laid off sixty-six percent of their staff, both the nanny and the gardener, and have beefed up the duties of the [...]
One time someone told me in a really convincing and authoritative voice that as an English major, it is really bad form that I claimed no interest in history. “All literature is history,” or maybe “All history is literature,” this person said and I shrugged and imagined maps and capitols and dates that wars ended [...]
If I bit it today, the obit would say I was a writer who struggled to move beyond 2,000 word blog posts about what happened this past week at Subway. Survivors include the love of her life and two naughty kitties. If I cashed in at 22, it would say I was a college graduate [...]
The last time you saw Heather Donahue she had a camera pointed up her nostrils, flared and leaking, and she was delivering her “Goodbye cruel world!” speech in one of the final scenes of “The Blair Witch Project.” In the decade plus since that movie she has had a few roles here and there — [...]
A few years ago Jodi asked me, like she has asked so many people on this website, what book I wanted to read before I died. I eschewed the Russians, the bible, all sorts of weighty tomes for this: Underworld by Don Delillo. Underworld was published when I was in college, a part time bookseller [...]
Historical fiction is, essentially, literary fan fiction. It’s the literary part that gives it more cred than “Friday Night Lights” superfans hanging out on a bulletin board dreamily considering what if Julie Taylor came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her lips flushed and red, her skin dewy, and found Tim Riggins, primed, [...]
Eleanor Henderson’s novel Ten Thousand Saints starts with a condensed version of the one-crazy-night premise from which entire films are built. It’s a lazy New Year’s Eve day of smoking, huffing, drinking, and snorting for Teddy and Jude. The inseparable teen-aged besties are skateboarders with next to no social currency. Teddy’s mom has skipped town [...]
Either the past year in books didn’t have the same crash-bang-pow as 2010 or else I just did a meh job of finding the new and the hot to stain with my saliva. I figured out pretty early on that this list would never have the purity of being a list of just books published [...]
Picture yourself. Age, low 20s. Maybe you get a general idea that includes your favorite denim cutoffs and Martin Zellar covering Neil Diamond. Your hair styled like a teenage boy, a skateboarder, and you loved mixing Leinie’s Berry and Honey Weiss and drinking it over ice. The morning you walked home wearing the remains of [...]
The first thing you need to know about Haruki Murakami’s hefty slab of a novel 1Q84 is that it sizzles. Seriously. Pick it up off the display at your local bookstore. It’s like 5 pounds and it’s wrapped in this higher-test version of cloudy tissue paper and there must be an electric power source, a [...]
You want magic, I’ll give you some magic: You spend a week reading a super-magical book with a magical premise, filled with mysterious circumstances, characters in whooshing formal-ware, secret spells and magic rooms and midnight dinner parties complete with a contortionist. You love it, seep into it, can see every magical illusion, every magical backdrop. [...]
There are two ways to read Anne Enright’s novel The Forgotten Waltz: The first, as a sexy page-turner filled with feigned nonchalance between instances of passionate hotel room hopping; The second, as one woman walking into the middle of life-as-she-knows-it with dynamite stuffed into her Wonder Bra. The premise is that Gina Moynihan is going [...]
At first I didn’t like Miranda July. She seemed too precious. Her first book of short stories, contrived quirkiness. Like watching Zooey Deschanel shop for leg warmers at Goodwill. But I didn’t like Miranda July in that way that meant I’d be peeking out from behind the curtains to watch her walk down the street. [...]
When Rosalinda Achmetowna’s frumpy, stupid and ill-mannered daughter Sulfia gets knocked up, she can’t help but believe that it didn’t happen the traditional way. Who would sleep with Sulfia? No, it must be as Sulfia claims: Something that happened in a dream. Rosa sets out to fix it, using an arsenal of home abortion techniques [...]
When the people in Joan Didion’s life die, it’s the kind of thing that makes the news. Niece, before the release of the biggest movie she will live to make, “Poltergeist,” strangled by an ex-boyfriend. Husband dies of a heart attack, and Didion’s account of it wins a National Book Award. Her brother-in-law, bladder cancer, [...]
Coming-of-age novels come with an absolution: They don't actually have to be about-about anything. They can just be. A series of events, linked or otherwise, that start quirky and end artfully or in some combination of that. Sarah Winman's debut novel When God was a Rabbit takes advantage of this convention. Technically it’s about a [...]
In August I read an essay by Alexandra Styron that partly recounted the first time she tried to read her father's most famous work. Sophie's Choiceby William Styron was still in galley form, and I suppose, symbolically, so was she. Alexandra made it about as far as the narrator's erotic dream before she worried about [...]
You are going to want to subscribe to the who-do voodoo that the hulking bipolar disorder in Jeffrey Eugenides' novel The Marriage Plot is a nod to his old peer-ish sort David Foster Wallace. You will see it in the clunky Timberlands on his feet and the way he ties that bandanna around his hair [...]
The young costumed actor at Epcot Center greeted us with a British accent. We must have been in a zone dedicated to all things charming and UK. It was the mid-1980s and my brother and I were too old to be Disney World's target audience, but my parents had decided that if we went any [...]
Here is a sentence that will make you run-no-sprint for your medium of choice: “Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.” Kudos, Kevin Wilson, for this little gem buried deep in the novel The Family Fang. The Fang Family is a cute little one-sitter of a novel about a terrifically [...]
Dear Shevaun, You left a self-addressed envelope, the size of a note card, in the Duluth Public Library’s copy of The White Album, a collection of essays by Joan Didion. Your name as both the sender and receiver. Both address labels indicate an association with the University of Florida. One is decorated with a UF, [...]
In my 1980s, video games did not even play a supporting role. We didn’t own Atari. My parent’s loathed fads, ‘it’ items. Things advertised between cartoons and things that made moms trample moms in the Toys R Us parking lot. Plus it was expensive. Addictive. An indoor sport. The first in a long line of [...]
The world is just so huge, boundary-less, in young adult fiction. It’s malleable. A soft fontenelle. A kid standing at the foot of her parent’s bed and saying: When I grow up I want to be a cheerleader and a fireman and a teacher and a rock star and a robot. Maybe I’ll be the [...]
It’s obvious where Chuck Klosterman came up with the premise for his novel The Visible Man. Old Red Beard’s 2009 book of essays Eating the Dinosaur includes a chapter about watching through the window a twentysomething woman who lived in an efficiency apartment similar to his own in Fargo. Making dinner, working out on a [...]
The end of August my boyfriend and I were in New York City, waiting for Hurricane Irene to blink. We spent two of our five day vacation trying to figure out if we should wait out the storm, potentially arm-wrestling the natives for bottled water and pork rind rations, or cut it short and ditch [...]
Belated gracias to NY Magazine, who in 2007 did a Q&A with artist Adrian Tomine, who in turn answered exactly what I was wondering when I finished his graphic novel Shortcomings. Namely: Here I am reading a portrait of a cranky 30-something cuss, argumentative and flawed in ways that would take detangling spray to begin [...]
By this time last year, the world of contemporary fiction had me dizzy with a one-two whammo of love and envy. Shit was tight. I wouldn’t pay $50 to press my breasts against the stage while my favorite band played. I’d have paid $50 times 50 to scrape gum off Jennifer Egan’s shoes or observe [...]
Sat down to write about artist MariNaomi’s draw-all tell-all graphic memoir Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume from 0-22,‘and found myself penning memories about playing tug-o-war over the one neighborhood boy on Fifth Place Northwest. Playing boyfriend-girlfriend in a room full of girls, sitting in a bean bag chair and drinking water we pretended was [...]
Last summer I fell in love with a wordy piece of coming-of-age fiction starring an emotionally mute young woman and a doomed love affair with an older, even more emotionally mute man, a boxer. Thinking about that book now I just see long, hot weekends on our deck with a glass of water and all [...]
